There are many different types of techniques for discovering information, using a computer network. One specific technique is referred to as a community-based question and answering service (referred to as cQA). The cQA service is a kind of web service through which people can post questions and also answer other people's questions on a web site. The growth of cQA has been relatively significant, and it has recently been offered by commercially available web search engines.
In current cQA services, a community of users either subscribes to the service, or simply accesses the service through a network. The users in the community can then post questions that are viewable by other users in the community. The community users can also post answers to questions that were previously submitted by other users. Therefore, over time, cQA services build up very large archives of previous questions and answers posted for those previous questions.
In some current cQA systems, once the user who has asked a question and has received a sufficient number of answers, the user can then choose the best answer from those answers that have been received. The user may also simply leave it to the community to vote for the best answer. This results in large question and answer archives, representing knowledge repositories, that can be used later.
For instance, these repositories can be used to expedite answers to the user. In other words, there is typically a lag time between the time when a user in the community posts a question, and the time when other users of the community post answers to that question. In order to avoid this lag time, some cQA services automatically search the archive of questions and answers to see if the same question has previously been asked. If the question is found in the archives, then one or more previous answers can be provided, in answer to the current question, with very little delay. This type of searching for previous answers is sometimes referred to as “question search” or “on-line search”.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.